How to Choose an eCommerce Platform

Today importance and growing popularity of ecommerce are evident. It’s not surprising that more businesses move online where they can reach new customers.

Selecting which software platform you’ll use for your web store is an important decision. If you are looking for the right solution to sell some products on the Internet, this article is for you.

Choosing the appropriate eCommerce platform is the first step on your way to success. It is essential to select one that will provide you with the features necessary to run a successful online store. So this decision should be made carefully.

Most eCommerce solutions provide the basics to get you started. This includes customizable site templates, an integrated shopping cart, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, inventory management and analytics. To find the best one for your business, you need to look at what is the most important for you. Once you have a list of the features you need, look for a platform that can provide the tools and services to meet your business goals.

Here, we take a look at the best available platforms. I hope this overview will guide you in the right direction.

Magento serves more than 110,000 merchants worldwide and is the world’s fastest growing eCommerce platform.

There are 12 payment gateways, besides, you can choose from 87 payment extensions. Translated into over 60 languages and supporting multiple currencies, and taxes, Magento allows for full internationalization of your online channel.

You have to pay for the Enterprise Edition, which is full of extremely useful features, but the Community Edition is free to download and use.

PretsaShop is professional open-source eCommerce software with a lot of features and a good-looking admin interface. It powers over 100 000 active stores worldwide.

PrestaShop is open to a variety of payment methods: 12 embedded payment gateways and 100 modules can be downloaded to extend the list. A single store can be translated into 41 languages, and you can set an unlimited number of translations on your shop. PrestaShop allows you to create an unlimited number of currencies to display on the store and set tax rules and guidelines according to your country.

You can download, install, and use it for free.

Highlighted Features

Available quantities displaying

Possibilities of product export to eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, and more

osCommerce is an online shop solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features. Being one of the oldest eCommerce platforms, it powers 12724 live stores around the world.

There are 9 payment gateways to choose from: 2Checkout.com, Authorize.Net, ChronoPay, iPayment, PayNova, Paypal, PSIGate, SecPay and TrustCommerce. Besides, you can find numerous extensions that will let you integrate payment methods for different countries. osCommerce is completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default and has multicurrency support.

This platform is feature-rich, but still there are certain disadvantages: the front end of OsCommerce is not developed using CSS; the code base is also overly complex which makes extending more difficult.

Zen Cart is user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. It can be installed and set-up by anyone with basic web site building and computer skills. It’s also easy to customize and easy to manage. Zen Cart branched from osCommerce, so you can expect very similar features.

VirtueMart has been designed to work alongside Joomla! But you can extend the functionality of Joomla! and VirtueMart using plugins, components, templates and modules to make them do what you need.

The platform has pre-defined payment gateways like Authorize.net, PayPal, 2Checkout, eWay, Worldpay, PayMate and NoChex. Your shop can be extended with other payment modules using the payment module API. Multiple languages and currencies are supported. You can allow customers to change the currency and buy using an alternative currency.

OpenCart is a turn-key ready “out of the box” shopping cart solution. It is designed feature rich, easy to use, and search engine friendly.

There are 22 payment gateways; many more can be found in the extension section. The platform is multi-currency and supports 18 languages and various shipping methods that are included in the default OpenCart download.

The platform is available for free.

Highlighted Features

Template system

Automatic image resizing

Unlimited information pages

Multi-store abilities

Module system which allows users to easily extend the functionality for their needs

Guest checkout

Shipping weight calculation

But due to the fact that the platform is not very popular, help is not so freely available.

CubeCart is powerful but simple to use. It integrates well into all kinds of sites and looks professional from the customers’ point of view. Once a store is installed with a few clicks, it is possible to enable all kinds of plugins and modules.

You can choose from 30+ payment gateways. German, English (UK), English (US), Spanish, French & Dutch are among editable languages. There is multiple currency support and 7 shipping methods.

Two different versions of the product have been released. CubeCart Lite is a free version, CubeCart Pro is an inexpensive commercial version.

TomatoCart is the new generation of open source shopping cart solution, branched from osCommerce. It is easy to download, install and update.

People from different countries have different favored payment methods. Just pick up the right one for you among the 26 built-in payment methods in TomatoCart (including Amazon IPN, Authorize.net, PayPal). The system has only one language, English, set by default. But you can upload and manage your language in the Languages section. TomatoCart offers multi-currency support and different shipping methods.

Shopify is a hosted ecommerce solution that provides you with everything you need to run a web store. You have full control of your website design, HTML & CSS.

Shopify is integrated with over 50 payment gateways including PayPal. You can also customize the checkout page into one of 50+ languages, or translate all the content, including the checkout page into any language. Shopify supports local currencies, tax rates, etc.

BigCommerce is a good choice for any small business that wants to start an online shop and maintain an eBay business. It makes it easy to setup your own professional web store – no coding or design experience required.

BigCommerce provides support for 50+ gateways and multiple currencies. It supports only the English/western character set at this time.

You can choose a suitable version of BigCommerce platform taking into consideration the size and demands of your business. The platform is affordable, besides, a fully-functional 15-day trial is free.

@Vitaliy
In our post we compared the most popular platforms. It’s quite difficult to cover all existing ones. We will take into consideration your request and will try to include the overview of LemonStand in one of our next posts.

This is a very thorough guide – well done! It's also worth considering not only which payment gateways your cart is integrated with, but also which payment products the cart supports. For example, eWAY merchants can take payments seamlessly through their websites without any credit card data touching their systems, but only if the cart has integrated our Rapid API product.
Kind regards,
The eWAY Team

Great collection. These are all well-known and trusted Ecommerce platform. However, choosing the right one that fits on my small business is tough. Thanks for making an overview. This helps me to decide.

With our client running Zen-cart for years and got hacked so many times, we decided to move on to Magento. With eBay now owns Magento, we believe they will have much better commercial support.
However, Magento is also the hardest to setup, config and use. It also requires a more powerful server to run on.
This is a great this of shopping card. We do NOT recommend to use OS Commerce, Shopify and Zen-Cart.
We do like Big Commerce though.

Very good list but i would love to add EasyStorehosting also.
I have tried EasyStorehosting, and it genuinely works.
EasyStoreHosting offers e-commerce hosting without any extra charge and
The best thing is that provide “technical support service” free of cost.
The most important thing to do is to figure out what you need in an e-commerce system. So, it is extremely important that you begin your search for the best ecommerce software by making a strict selection of those offerings that match your needs, and leaving out all the other ecommerce shopping cart software.
Once you've filtered them, you can start comparing them by means of the demo storefronts that they typically come with. Another helpful hint would be to simply check out the software on web sites that are using it.

@chandan
You are absolutely right when it comes to choosing eCommerce platform. There is no 'one size fits all' solution, and merchants should first define for themselves what they need the platform for.
After this being done, they should look for the system that meets their demands.

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